Dan Falk (@danfalk.bsky.social)'s piece about the Scopes trial, which included comments from yours truly, was among Smithsonian magazine's top ten stories for 2025!

Frozen pond scene, Halifax, NS, a couple of days ago: ( #winter #photography )

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" first appeared #OTD in 1818. A while back, I wrote about the real-life #science that inspired Shelley's groundbreaking novel: www.mentalfloss.com/article/5268...

I’m enjoying @danielwhiteson.bsky.social ‘s book — but I’m not sure how much that looks like @seanmcarroll.bsky.social ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wake Up Dead Man was fine — but the best cinematic response to “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned” is still “That’s putting it mildly, 007.” (For Your Eyes Only, 1981.)

New Years Eve (afternoon), Black Rock Beach, Point Pleasant Park, Halifax:

1. As the year winds down, here are (in random order) seven things that I wrote about, or reported on, in 2025. 🧵 Starting with a radio report I did on whether natural philosophy is, or ought to be, making a comeback: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr... (cont'd...)

How easy / hard should it be to figure out a whodunnit film, before the answers are revealed? I would say, if you go as a group of three, maybe *one* of you should be able to figure it out. (If two of you can figure it out, it’s too easy.)

“We are here happily celebrating 100 years, but actually it’s a mess. We were given this theory, and we still don’t understand what it means.” @walkingthedot.bsky.social reports on quantum mechanics 100th birthday party, in @quantamagazine.bsky.social www.quantamagazine.org/its-a-mess-a... #physics

To think that I missed this back in 2021

Which other STEM fields have godfathers, besides AI? 🤔

More than one million people a week are having conversations about suicide with the suicide machine

Reflection of the former Saint Mary's Boys and Girls School (1521 and 1531 Grafton Street), Halifax, this afternoon:

Anyone else feel like we’re maybe two data centres away from people believing that Rodney Dangerfield was president in-between Eisenhower and Kennedy?

Happy Birthday to Johannes Kepler, born #OTD in 1571. Among other achievements, Kepler determined the true shape of planetary orbits (they're ellipses, not circles, as had long been assumed). 🪐 www.astronomy.com/today-in-the...

I wonder what a typical day is like for a Sarlacc. Like, do they just sit around, hoping that something will fall in?

Toronto scene (a few days ago). #Toronto #photography

Life has been evolving for 4 billion(ish) years here on Earth -- so far, confined to the planet itself. But Caleb Scharf argues that space is life's next logical, perhaps inevitable, frontier. I review his new book, "The Giant Leap," for @undark.org: undark.org/2025/12/26/b... #space #science

🙃 Last year, Christmas was on the 24th of Kislev; this years it’s on the 5th of Tevet — so confusing to have it jump around like that! 😉

FB keeps “suggesting” posts from the Babylon Bee — but I say no thanks to their anti-trans, pro-Bari-Weiss “humour.”

Revolution number 9; Love Potion number 9; and

A new national park is coming together in Chile. It would create an unbroken 2,800-mile wildlife corridor and help to preserve Indigenous culture and history as well as a magnificent environment. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Merry Christmas and Happy Isaac Newton's Birthday! :)

Toronto scene, earlier this evening: ( #toronto #photography #ChristmasEve )

"When you pass of fiction as nonfiction, it sets an impossible bar for writers of actual nonfiction to follow... Oliver Sacks, you broke my heart." Here's @mkonnikova.bsky.social on finding out that Oliver Sacks made stuff up: mariakonnikova.substack.com/p/the-man-wh...

(At n=200, Wordle average = 3.865.)

I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

Astronomy peeps! The Internet says Saturn's average distance from the sun is (approx) 1.4 billion km. Could we say that, by definition, this is also Saturn's average distance from Earth? (I wanna say, "yes, obviously" but...) @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy @astroroyalscot.bsky.social etc.

57 years ago today -- Dec. 21, 1968 -- Apollo 8 was launched, carrying humans away from Earth's immediate vicinity for the first time. I wrote about the mission's legacy a while back, for @nbcnews.com: www.nbcnews.com/mach/science... #Apollo #Apollo8 #space

We’re not told — but, in your imagination, how long did it take Luke to get to Dagobah?

Episode 40 of BookLab is now up! It's a roundup of Dan and Amanda's picks for the top science books of the past year, featuring new books by Sam Kean, Dagomar Degroot, Lynn Gamwell, Pria Anand, David Baron, and many more! booklabpodcast.com/booklab-040-... #science #books

Happy solstice everyone! 🌞

Just by way of a recap, the solution to yesterday's Revealed puzzle was Quentin "Taratino" 🤨🙄😐

Please enjoy today's Quirks & Quarks, in which you'll hear my "mini book reviews," along with Bob's interviews with authors who wrote science books in 2025. :) (If you're not near your radio... well, you can catch the podcast or just listen anytime at this link: www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks... )

Um... did anyone notice anything wonky with today's "Revealed" puzzle?

It's been a privilege to be a judge for the PEN America / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for 2025! Our longlist of ten finalists was announced this week: pen.org/announcing-t... (you have to scroll down a bit; PEN has a multitude of categories!) Big winner to be announced in January!

Now : “I don’t know, I just saw it in my news feed” :: Then : “I don’t know, I just noticed it on the bottom of my shoe.”

Me: "Meteor showers are great!" People: "Cool, will you be watching for the Geminids?" Me: "Hahaha no too cold."

What if..... What if Academia dot edu didn't auto-email me twice a week about a book review that I wrote 17 years ago?

An interesting take on conspiracy theories from Chris Fleming, who argues that they need to be seen as accusations -- "I accuse person / entity X of lying" -- and that they come with a moral cost: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

A few scenes from the Algonquin Radio Observatory (November 2025): #astronomy #radioastronomy #science #history #histsci #Ontario #Canada

Why three "demons" still keep physicists up at night. (Spoiler: they're associated with Maxwell, Laplace, and Loschmidt.) My latest for @newscientist.com: www.newscientist.com/article/2502... #physics

Filmmaker Roman Kroitor, who inspired Stanley Kubrick and gave George Lucas the idea for "the Force", was born #OTD in 1926. I wrote about his legacy a while back for @arstechnica.com: arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/... #filmmaking #movies

So, what's the deal with "observers" in quantum mechanics? Can one grok an interpretation of QM *without* observers? Well, @amandagefter.bsky.social has given this a lot of thought... nautil.us/reality-exis... via @nautil.us #physics #philosophy

So few parents name their kid Telemachus these days.

Lake Simcoe sunrise -- November 2025: ( #Ontario #Canada #photography )

RIP John Noble Wilford, a legend in the science writing community.

Although the solstice isn't for another 13 days, the earliest sunset (for northern hemisphere folks) is actually *today*. There's not much day-to-day variation this close to the solstice, and, rounded off to the nearest minute, sunset in e.g. Toronto is "stable" at 4:40 pm from Dec 4 to Dec 13. 🌞

Why the World Series made me think about the Multiverse: danfalk.ca/why-the-worl... (Pretend I posted this a month ago, when the World Series was still on everyone's minds. ;) ) #science #philosophy #baseball

The Halifax Explosion happened 108 years ago today. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... #history #Canada